I Just Installed A 2nd Hard Drive

[terry830]

the first hard drive has xp pro. the second hard drive has xp home.
i wanted the xp home to be used for the family and pro for my work.
now. everytime i boot the system it goes to xp pro.
how can i fix it to where i have an option to choose which hard drive to boot from. thx so much!

[Neil__]

go into control panel/system/advanced/startup and recovery settings and you can change the boot options there

[balamm]

If your Bios supports it, you can use the cable select setting at both drives and select the master in bios when you boot.
Normally, you'd install a boot loader when you have two OS's this similar and it would hide the unused one when the other was chosen. What you may have now is a mess of crosslinked files.

I'm not a fan of third party boot loaders at all though and my prefference is to do a minimal install of windows 98se and install each new XP/NT system from there to a new partition so that the built in NT boot loader/ boot choice is used. That may not work with XP Home and XP Pro on the same drive or system again as I said because they are basically the same operating system and installing files to either will cause some to be installed to each OS, crosslinking them.

[Neil__]

Originally posted by balamm@5 June 2003 - 18:34
If your Bios supports it, you can use the cable select setting at both drives and select the master in bios when you boot.
Normally, you'd install a boot loader when you have two OS's this similar and it would hide the unused one when the other was chosen. What you may have now is a mess of crosslinked files.

I'm not a fan of third party boot loaders at all though and my prefference is to do a minimal install of windows 98se and install each new XP/NT system from there to a new partition so that the built in NT boot loader/ boot choice is used. That may not work with XP Home and XP Pro on the same drive or system again as I said because they are basically the same operating system and installing files to either will cause some to be installed to each OS, crosslinking them.


I didn't think of that
Why would you want both installed? just set up different users on one version (dont bother with 2)and deny any access to other users from your administrator settings then your work files cannot be touched.

[harrycary]

I agree with you Neil. Why on earth waste your time with 2 similar O/Ss?

Any computer savvy user knows that WinXP and Pro are truely secure and simple enough to configure for multiple users.

Hell, use that 2nd drive for storage.